• Aluf Benn argues that the national-unity coalition gives Prime Minister Netanyahu more power without diminishing his influence over the government. [TNR]

• Speaking in Israel, the mayor of Caracas said Venezuela would wish to restore friendly ties with Israel if and when Chávez falls. [Ynet]

• The Knesset soundly defeated a bill that would have extended civil marriage to same-sex couples. [JPost/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A New Hampshire state legislator has been welcomed back into the chamber after he apologized, not once, not twice, but thrice for shouting “Sieg Heil!” [JTA]

• Beinart-watchers, -lovers, and –trolls, rev up your engines for the forthcoming New York Review of Books profile. [Mondoweiss]

Neil Young and Crazy Borscht, which matches different restaurants’ borschts to a Neil Young album, is amazing. I think of Veselka’s when I hear this tune:

Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist who published the book A New Shoah and publishes regularly at Front Page and Ynet, argued yesterday that attacks on Israel and Israeli officials for touting the country’s stellar gay-rights record have it backwards: in fact, he said, Israel truly is “not only a holy emerald city for gays; it’s the only place in the Middle East where gays are free to walk hand-in-hand and kiss in public.”

Echoing James Kirchick’s polemic in Tablet Magazine a few months ago against the charge of “pinkwashing,” Meotti writes, “One would be hard-pressed to find a country that oppresses its gays and treats its Jews well, or vice versa. From Nazi Germany to the Middle East, societies that persecute Jews will get to homosexuals eventually.”

Except those are actually Kirchick’s words.

It’s one of four instances in which Meotti, who elsewhere in the piece cites writers like Yossi Klein Halevi, appears to lift quotes. Meotti wrote in an email that he penned the article in Italian and then translated it into English. “I took inspiration from this very important column of my friend Bret Stephens. And that of Kirchick,” he said, when asked about the similarities between passages in his essay and in other essays. “I had no idea of the others. I write extensively in Italian about gays in Israel.”

In his column Meotti writes: “One would be hard-pressed to find a country that oppresses its gays and treats its Jews well, or vice versa. From Nazi Germany to the Middle East, societies that persecute Jews will get to homosexuals eventually.”

In 2010, Kirchick wrote: “One would be hard-pressed to find a country that oppresses its gays and treats its Jews well, or vice versa. From Nazi Germany to the Middle East, societies that persecute Jews will get to homosexuals eventually.”

Meotti writes: “Israel has been in the forefront of granting legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation.”

In 2003, Bret Stephens wrote: “Israel has been in the forefront of granting legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation.”

Meotti writes: “Gay men are sort of a ‘canary in a coal mine’ for what is happening to other minority groups in the entire Middle East.”

In a 2010 interview, Michael Luongo said: “The issues for gay men are sort of a ‘canary in a coal mine’ for what could happen to other minority groups.”

Meotti writes: “Gays are the clearest proof possible that Israel is the only free oasis in the desert of fear.”

In 2011, Gal Uchovsky wrote: “Gays, in their minds, are the clearest proof possible that Israel is the only modern, open oasis in an ever-more extreme Muslim desert.”

All four of the other essays appeared in English-language publications.

Repeated attempts to contact an opinion editor at Ynet were unsuccessful.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sources from which Meotti appears to have lifted all share his perspective: namely, that Israel has a stellar record on gay rights, one that puts the rest of its region to shame.

“I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Kirchick told Tablet Magazine when told of the lifts.

“I guess I should be outraged—outraged!—but frankly I’m somewhat flattered that someone remembered a column of mine from nearly a decade ago,” said Stephens. “In any event, his column makes a point worth repeating.”

UPDATE: Meotti has been accused of this sort of thing before.

Israel’s Gay Parade [Ynet]
Spanish Inquisition, Part II [WSJ]
Gay Pride—and Israel’s [JPost/Free Republic]
Out in the World [JPost]
Left and Gay in Israel [JPost]
Related: Pink Eye [Tablet Magazine]

In the shtetlsphere this morning, the takeway from the debate was clear: Kristol had surprised by praising Obama. “I am happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree,” Kristol said, according to Haaretz. The Forward’s Gal Beckerman agreed, reporting that Kristol also said Obama “moved back to the center” and is “sensible.”

Over email this afternoon, Kristol clarified last night’s remarks:

I was pointing out that Obama had moved away from his 2009 J-Street-like Cairo-speech approach to the Middle East towards a more traditional mushy-liberal-sort-of-supportive-of-Israel attitude in 2012. In my enthusiasm to illustrate just how ineffectual J Street has been, I may have exaggerated how much Obama is now in agreement with ECI! But in any case, in a second Obama term, all bets would be off. So while it’s true most American voters won’t vote on Israel in November, pro-Israel voters should of course prefer [Mitt] Romney to Obama. ECI will certainly continue to make that case.

He added, “And there are, don’t forget, lots of policy questions looming in 2012, and a whole bunch of Congressional elections. So plenty for ECI to do, even though J Street is now pretty irrelevant.”

Ben-Ami offered this comment about the alleged discrepancy between Kristol’s words last night and his group’s positions. “The question is really, do they [ECI] have a substantive objection to President Obama’s policies?” he asked. “If Bill Kristol is truly in favor of a Palestinian state, a two-state solution, does believe they should give up settlements, then what’s their objection? And if they don’t, then all they are is a Republican partisan attack machine, and they should stop masquerading as a group that is concerned with the future of Israel.”

Haaretz’ Chemi Shalev found last night’s debate (which I did not attend) “civil and even friendly.” Which might be proof that our problems could be solved by putting the opposing sides in the same room … and then keeping them there.

J Street’s Ben-Ami: ‘U.S. Congressmen Live in Fear of Pro-Israeli Intimidation’ [Haaretz West of Eden]
Who Took Over Bill Kristol’s Body Last Night? [Forward Thinking]

Hezbollah’s Newest Threat

Mayor Bloomberg’s office has attacked Hynes for alleged favoritism.

Meanwhile, the Village Voice’s Nick Pinto has a different complaint: “many were dismayed,” he reports, “that the Times series failed to credit the work of other reporters who have been on the beat for years.” Many of these reporters, of course, have come from the world of Jewish media; Pinto cites work in Jewish Week and Failed Messiah’s Shmarya Rosenberg.

In Tablet Magazine last year, Paul Berger reported on one Borough Park Scandal in which community members allegedly failed to take complaints to the civil authorities. And also last year, Michael Orbach accused Hynes of not pursuing another sex case against a Brooklyn Hasidic man. So, from all of us at other daily magazines of Jewish life and culture: ahem.

We All Work to Protect Brooklyn’s Kids [NYDN]
Not Fit to Print [Village Voice/JI Daily]
Related: For Ultra-Orthodox in Abuse Cases, Prosecutor Has Different Rules [NYT]
Abuses [Tablet Magazine]
Unmolested [Tablet Magazine]

Grandma’s Lost Challah, Found

One, of course, hardly looks to New York as the paragon of morally serious reporting; last week’s cover story, for example, was an analysis of Facebook written by Henry Blodget, the disgraced Merrill Lynch analyst whose practices of lying to the public were so craven that he was banned from the securities industry for life. And yet, even the shallow end of the pool has to abide by the rules, and the inclusion of an arch-terrorist like Nasrallah in a list otherwise dominated by singers, designers, and filmmakers is maddening—mainly because New York never calls him that. Instead, Nasrallah is described as “the most powerful political figure in Lebanon” and as “the leader of the Shiite militant group and political party Hezbollah.” Call them political, call them militant, just don’t call them late for dinner!

I realize that such matters aren’t as important as the magazine’s usual preoccupations, such as a recipe for olive-oil poached bluefish crostini or word about the hottest new trends in manicures. But common sense and the U.S. Department of State both consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization. And while New York is largely correct to attribute Nasrallah’s power to his parliamentary influence, there’s also the minor trifle about his very likely being the one behind the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an act of violence that disturbed the delicate balance that is Lebanon’s political system. Oh, and there’s the minor thingie about the war Nasrallah started when his men killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two in the summer of 2006, a war that cost more than a thousand Lebanese civilians their lives.

The rest of the feature is similarly complacent. The answer to the question, “Christian or Muslim?” is “It’s complicated,” as though it were a long-distance relationship on Facebook. It notes that “while there is a vibrant gay subculture, homosexual activity is technically illegal” and that “travelers with Israeli stamps in their passports (or even so much as a Jewish-sounding last name) can still be arrested and detained.” So, Beirut is awesome if you’re straight and Christian. Good to know.

Beirut is probably an awesome place to visit—I’d jump at the unlikely chance. But if New York wants to sell it with reference to international politics, it might consider approaching the topic seriously and accurately. Otherwise, back to piffles we go.

The Urbanist’s Beirut [NY Mag]

The End of the Jewish Left

Golden Dawn at once pays homage to and veers from Hitler’s ideology; it seems to imply that they are Nazis but will never be quite as good Nazis as the actual Nazis. They might say they suffered from an “anxiety of influence,” at least until they learned that a Jew coined that phrase. And you can see this identity crisis in their official flag:

Actual Golden Dawn flag.

One’s heart breaks for that poor, mangled, indecisive swastika. Golden Dawn, which is so much more of an interesting brand of Nazi party, deserves better, and with that in mind, I asked Tablet Magazine’s contributing artist, Margarita Korol, to come up with some flags that might put a more proudly Nazi step forward.

Love Nazis. You’re Golden Dawn! Say it loud, say it proud!

Manly Nazis. Totally heterosexual, too.

Sad Nazis. Only seven percent of the vote. ;-(.

Dada Nazis. So pomo.

Pride Nazis. Be inclusive: It’ll help you get more votes!

Apologetic Nazis. Look, this isn’t about hating the Jews, it’s just about being Nazis. See?

Yoga Nazis. Ommmm.

Big Mac Nazis. Yummmm.

Greek Nazis. Putting the “national” back in National Socialism.

Greek Nazis Deny Camps Had Gas Chambers [JTA/Forward]
Earlier: Golden Dawn Rising in Greece

• Salafists in Lebanon are getting energized by the civil war against the Shiite regime next door in Syria. [WP]

• What was between the lines has been made explicit: Israel’s 11th-hour deal with the hunger strikers created conditions for a relatively mild Nakba Day. [Haaretz]

• The RAND Corporation sides with Meir Dagan et al against attacking Iran right now. [Haaretz]

• Speaking of, Dagan is definitely politicking—now he’s opining on the Tal Law. [JPost]

• Right now, for the first time, Argentina has a Jewish president (he won’t be president tomorrow). [JTA]

Yet at a celebration this past Friday for the rebuilding of portions of Beirut’s southern suburbs destroyed in the 2006 war with Israel, Nasrallah asked his followers: “Why wasn’t [Israel] content with the killings in the battlefield, or with bombing military bases? Why did it expand its aggression to destroy homes and schools?”

Nasrallah apparently wants it both ways. He runs a guerrilla organization that stores its arms in homes and schools and hides among a civilian population that supports Hezbollah’s brand of asymmetric warfare. At the same time, he seeks to prick the conscience of the international community in order to have Israel sanctioned for crimes against the same population that his group uses as human shields.

But there’s something else behind his Friday remarks: Nasrallah is more sensitive than ever to the devastation to which he has exposed the Shiite community because he fears that the culture of resistance Hezbollah has cultivated may be on the wane. Or, as anti-Hezbollah Shiite activist Lokman Slim told me “The shelf-life of the resistance has reached its expiration date.”

Last week in Beirut I found that many Shiites, even those not actively opposed to Hezbollah, are becoming increasingly anxious about the role that the party has designed for them—as cannon fodder in the next round of warfare with Israel.

***

I spoke with Slim at a reception he was hosting last week in Beirut in honor of a dissident Shiite cleric, Sheikh Hassan Mchaymech, once a part of Hezbollah’s leadership and now imprisoned for challenging the party’s doctrine. In his writings over the last two decades, Mchaymech has promoted democracy and criticized the notion of guardianship of the jurist (wilayet al-faqih), the theory handed down by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which confers on Iran’s supreme religious leader supreme political power as well.

Guardianship of the jurist is also what gives Tehran command and control over Hezbollah, an organization that it seeded more than 30 years ago in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and continues to fund lavishly. The result is that the fate of Lebanon’s entire Shiite community—whether or not they’ve signed on to the culture of resistance—is in the hands of the Iranians. Hezbollah and its allies in Syria have accused Mchaymech of collaborating with Israel in order to silence him and anyone else who thinks of stepping out of line. But Slim contends that it is Hezbollah that is collaborating—with Iran—at the expense of Lebanon’s Shiites.

Slim is hardly alone in his criticism of Hezbollah. Recently there have been a number of signs—including books, like the recently published volume of Mchaymech’s, as well as newspaper articles from Shiite journalists explicitly attacking Nasrallah—that suggest Hezbollah is feeling the heat at home.

Hezbollah may control the Lebanese government, but the party hasn’t distinguished itself for its stewardship. Even in its own Shiite regions, like Beirut’s southern suburbs, the community, according to knowledgeable inside observers, is plagued with a growing crime rate, drug usage, and other sociological problems that Hezbollah has proven incapable of managing.

Perhaps worst of all, the situation unfolding in neighboring Syria has left Hezbollah and its constituents in a bind: If the Assad regime is toppled, Hezbollah will lose one of its two patrons, Iran being the other. And yet Nasrallah has openly sided with the regime in Damascus and perhaps even sent fighters to assist Assad. And now many of Lebanon’s Shiites are asking themselves: Why is a resistance movement that is supposed to champion justice taking the side of a regime that slaughters other Muslims?

In short, it’s not a great time to be Hassan Nasrallah. Indeed, even last Friday’s celebration for the southern suburbs is evidence of the challenges the Hezbollah chief faces.

“The party was supposed to be held this coming July,” said Ali al-Amine, editor of a monthly Arab-language magazine called Shu’un Janubiya, which focuses on the concerns of the country’s Shiite community. “They pushed it up two months for a reason. Hezbollah is trying to show its supporters that they’ve done something good for the community and this is the only occasion it has to bring good news.”

This gathering for Mchaymech, which brought together notable Shiite figures including clerics, like Sheikh Sayyed Muhammad Hassan Al-Amine (the editor’s father), politicians, and journalists, suggests that while Hezbollah still commands the loyalty of much of the Shiite community, there is a small yet growing resistance toward Hezbollah.

“Some of the Shia community benefited from the 2006 war with Israel and wants to hold on to its gains,” said Slim, referring to the money that poured in from Iran and elsewhere during the conflict. He argues that this has created a level of affluence that has the potential to be damaging to a movement whose members used to rate themselves according to their sacrifices, not the size of their SUVs.

Slim has his own resistance credentials. In the Lebanese civil war, he fought alongside the Palestinians against Israel and promised to himself that if he lived through Ariel Sharon’s 1982 invasion he’d leave the war as well as Lebanon. In the early ’90s, he returned from Europe to the southern suburbs of Beirut to stand up to Hezbollah in one of its own strongholds and has seen the damage that the party has done to the Shiite community. “Those Shia who lost their homes and money in 2006 don’t want to go through it again,” Slim said. “As far as they’re concerned, Hezbollah checked off that box labeled resistance with the 2006 war. It’s over.”

***

In the likely scenario detailed by Israeli, American, and other Western strategists, if Israel attacks Iranian nuclear facilities, Tehran will unleash Hezbollah to retaliate. Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed his unity government—what some are calling a war Cabinet—it’s clear that the Shiites are anything but eager to bear that burden in Iran’s fight with Israel. Moreover, it appears that the Jewish state isn’t even Hezbollah’s biggest concern at present. “The Israel issue is secondary right now,” Amine, the editor, told me. “The Syria issue is primary.”

Hezbollah’s big concern is that the 14-month-old uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could cut off its main arms route and strip the Lebanese militia of its strategic depth. The Shiite community also fears the uprising, but for a different reason: If a Sunni ruler replaces Assad’s Alawite regime it would jeopardize the political and financial prestige that many Lebanese Shiites have come to enjoy under the dispensation of Hezbollah. As Hezbollah leaders have quietly let on among their followers, a Sunni regime will represent an existential threat to the Shiites. “They don’t talk about it in public speeches,” Amine said. “But their internal communications are all fixated on the Sunnis. They talk about the threat coming from al-Qaida and the Salafis.”

Naming Israel as the enemy is easy, said Slim. But identifying the Salafis as their main concern poses a delicate problem for Hezbollah. “These are fellow Muslims,” Slim explained. Moreover, playing the sectarian card may well backfire on the Shiite resistance movement. But right now, Hezbollah’s main goal is to keep the reins tight on its own community. As Amine said, “Hezbollah is using this fear of the Salafis to control the Shia.” And most Shiites, he added, “live and breathe because of Hezbollah. They can’t exist outside of this culture.”

And yet there are other members of the Shiite community who are in the midst of a full-scale insurrection against the party of God. Slim told me that he’s been waiting for this moment. “I saw the birth of Hezbollah,” he said. “It is not divine, but a human thing, which means it has a lifespan. I will see its end as well.”

***

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Behind the complaint, however, it was possible to hear a larger, more painful question. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, from the first immigrant generation through the baby boom, the radical and revolutionary left played a hugely important role in defining how the rest of America saw Jews and how Jews saw themselves. From Mike Gold’s proletarian novel Jews Without Money all the way down to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the literature and mythology of American Jewish radicalism has often appeared identical—to a certain audience—with Judaism itself. Even now there are people who revel in bygone lore about the Forverts and the Freiheit, Jay Lovestone and Max Shachtman. But living heirs to that tradition can be hard to find. Somewhat plaintively, my neighbor at the conference—like many of the participants—seemed to be asking, Is there still such a thing as a Jewish left? And if not, ought we to regret it?

The left that was at issue in the YIVO conference had little to do with what we now, in the shrunken spectrum of American political discourse, call the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. A 2005 Pew study found that Jews were the single most liberal religious group in America. Last month, a poll of American Jews showed that 62 percent planned to vote for Barack Obama in November—down from the 78 percent he got in 2008, but still more than twice as much as the 29 percent who said they would vote for Mitt Romney. Depending on your point of view, the still-durable association of Jews with liberalism and the Democratic Party is a source of either pride or bafflement (as in Norman Podhoretz’s plaintively titled Why Are Jews Liberals?).

Looked at another way, however, the softening mainstream liberalism of American Jews can be seen as the feeble remnant of what was once a fiery and uncompromising leftism. Indeed, as historian Tony Michels said at the YIVO conference, the history of American Communism “cannot be understood without Jews.” But the mood of the conference was best summed up in the title of the keynote address, by the political philosopher Michael Walzer: “The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism.” What was once a proud inheritance now seems like a problem in need of a solution. For many Jews, it remains axiomatic that Judaism is a religion of social justice and progress; the phrase “tikkun olam” has become a convenient shorthand for the idea that Judaism is best expressed in “repair of the world.”

In his speech, and in his new book In God’s Shadow: Politics and the Hebrew Bible, Walzer offers a contrary vision of traditional Judaism, which he argues “offers precious little support to left politics”—a truth that he recognized would surprise those who, like himself, “grew up believing that Judaism and socialism were pretty much the same thing.” If a leftist political message cannot readily be found in the traditions of Judaism, it follows that the explosion of Jewish leftism in the late 19th century was actually a rupture with Jewish history, and potentially a traumatic one.

***

Walzer’s reluctance to associate Judaism too simply with leftist politics, or indeed with any politics, represents a break from his earlier thinking. In his influential 1985 book Exodus and Revolution, for instance, Walzer argued that the Exodus narrative had provided a template for generations of revolutionaries and progressives in Western society, offering a model of how to escape an oppressive past and create a better future. The contrast with his new book could not be sharper. In this work, Walzer reads the Bible with an eye to its explicit and implicit teachings about politics and finds that its most eloquent message on the subject is silence. “The political activity of ordinary people is not a Biblical subject,” he writes, “nor is there any explicit recognition of political space, an agora or forum, where people congregate to argue about and decide on the policies of the community.”

Coming from Walzer, who co-edited a multivolume treatise on “The Jewish Political Tradition,” and who has been one of the leading theorists of mainstream left-liberalism for decades, this emphasis on the antipolitical nature of the Bible is striking. In his YIVO speech, he listed six central features of traditional Judaism that made it a conservative force, including the very idea of Jews as a chosen people—an idea that cannot easily be made to harmonize with universalism and egalitarianism.

Where the Greek tradition made room for public decision-making, Walzer argues, the same space in the Bible is filled entirely by God: All historical and legal initiatives must come from the deity, or appear to do so. In fact, the Pentateuch contains three separate legal codes, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, which contradict one another in many details and clearly were written by different groups of Israelites at different times. But because of the pious fiction that all these laws came from the same God, it was impossible for the legal deliberations that created them to become public; the lawmakers hid themselves behind a divine facade. They were, Walzer writes, “the secret legislators of Israel,” and as long as legislation remains secret, it cannot be truly political.

The same principle holds true of the later history of the Israelite kingdom. Much of In God’s Shadow deals with the ambiguous status of the prophet in the polity of ancient Israel. When contemporary liberals and leftists want to anchor their beliefs in Jewish tradition, it is to the prophets that they most often turn: the scathing denunciations of Amos and Jeremiah, the messianic vision of Isaiah. “We have a picture in our mind of the people described by Amos,” Walzer writes. “They are, so to speak, the local bourgeoisie,” and Amos speaks for the Israelite proletariat.

Continue reading: The modern Jewish radical tradition

Back in the late 1980s, when I was a new bride, I phoned my mother long distance, from my home in Jerusalem to her home in New York. “I don’t have a recipe,” she told me. “Why potchke? Buy! The bakery makes such good challahs.”

But I wanted to bake. I wanted to stretch my muscles, dirty my fingers, and knead my prayers into my dough as I imagined my grandmother had done.

“Are you sure you don’t remember?” I prodded.

My mother remembered one detail about my grandmother’s technique: “She used to save a piece from the dough and put it into the next week’s dough.”

From Torah classes, I knew about the Showbread of the Holy Temple, the Lehem HaPanim, and about the Matriarch Sarah’s challah—both of which remained fresh throughout the week. Since my grandmother was a rabbi’s daughter, I imagined that by saving this piece, my grandmother was copying Sarah and the ancient Temple priests. But who could be sure? I never imagined that I’d solve the mystery of this esoteric ritual—and that it would lead me to a deeper connection with my grandmother.

***

Born at the turn of the 20th century in Czenger, in northeastern Hungary, Cecilia Tzirel Blau was the fourth of six children. An intelligent child, she attended school until she was 16, a long time in those days. In her early twenties, she married Chaim Bleier, a handsome former yeshiva student and World War I veteran who was 10 years her senior. Less than a year later, she gave birth to a son and named him after Theodor Herzl; he died in infancy.

During childbirth, my grandmother contracted puerperal, or childbed, fever, which almost killed her. Her doctor ordered her to stop having children, but the following year she became pregnant again. Like the biblical matriarchs, her desire to give life outweighed her desire to live. Again, she became ill, but this time both she and the baby survived. That baby was my mother, my grandmother’s only child.

In 1930, my grandfather immigrated to America illegally. He planned to bring over the rest of the family, but by the time he could afford boat tickets, war had broken out. In the spring of 1944, my mother and grandmother were deported. Upon their arrival at Auschwitz, a man approached them. “Nisht a tochter und a mama—shverstern,” he said: You aren’t mother and daughter—tell the Nazis that you are sisters. The Nazis were only interested in keeping young people alive, so they could work; if they’d known my grandmother’s actual age, she would have been sent to the gas chambers.

The scam nearly worked. My grandmother survived for six months. Then in October 1944, as she and my mother were being moved to another camp, my grandmother vanished. “I turned around and she was gone,” my mother recalled. No one knows whether she was shot or gassed or beaten to death. Every year on the day after Simchat Torah, my mother lights a yahrzeit candle.

I am my mother’s first child and only daughter. From my grandmother, I inherited my name—Carol is an Anglicization of Tzirel—my high cheekbones, my curly hair, my love of books and, according to my mother, a passion for baking challah.

Over time, I’ve learned about other challah recipes, shapes, and braiding techniques. I’ve heard of 12-braid challah, challah baked with chocolate chips, challah shaped like a hangman’s noose (for Purim), but I could never find a recipe that mentioned my grandmother’s practice of saving dough.

Until now. Reading Inside the Jewish Bakery: Recipes and Memories From the Golden Age of Jewish Baking, which came out several months ago, I found a sentence in the challah chapter that seemed to bop me over the head: “In the west of the Yiddishe heym—Germany, Austria, Hungary …. Barches were … leavened with wild yeast, giving it a pronounced sourdough flavor.”

From my own research into Jewish culinary history, I knew that barches was a European name for challah, an acronym of the phrase birkat Hashem hi teasher—the Lord’s blessing brings riches. But I’d never heard of sourdough challah. I knew enough about baking, however, to know that sourdough involves a starter, essentially a bit of fermented dough that’s saved from week to week. Could it be, I wondered, that my grandmother’s saved piece of dough was actually sourdough starter?

I phoned my mother. Like a detective ferreting out evidence, I was careful in my questioning.

“That dough your mother saved,” I asked, “what kind of container did she store it in?”

That would be a telltale sign. Sourdough starter required an earthenware or glass home to survive.

“It was a crock,” she told me.

That was it. My story about my grandmother emulating Sarah the Matriarch, carrying on the ancient tradition of the Showbread from Temple days, was as phony as Bernie Madoff’s stock fund. But I didn’t care. I was thrilled! There was no grave to visit, and only some photographs and tablecloths as mementos of a woman I never met, so this recipe would take me as close as I could ever get to her.

I got to work making my first ever batch of sourdough starter. Following the instructions in Joy of Cooking, I combined flour, water, and yeast into a substance that looked suspiciously similar to beige house paint. For a week, my starter sat on my windowsill shrouded with a white dishtowel. Like an anxious mother of a newborn, I checked it constantly, stirring it every so often with a wooden spoon to bring on the desired chemical reaction.

As Irma Rombauer writes in Joy of Cooking, sourdough is for the “adventurous, persistent and leisurely cook.” After a full week, my starter bubbled and let out a strong smell, which I hoped indicated that the desired fermentation had occurred.

Using the starter, I tried the Rich Sourdough Barches recipe from Inside the Jewish Bakery, which the authors say is adapted from the Trumat HaDeshen, the writings of 15th-century sage Rabbi Israel ben Petachiah Isserlein. Excited as I was to be taking this journey into culinary history, the cookbook’s description of a “pronounced sourdough flavor” made me fear that my challah would taste acidic, and the dough’s firmness and long rising time made me worry that my barches would be tough. So, I hedged my bet and made sourdough barches rolls instead. Since rolls weren’t quite as majestic as full-sized challahs, I reckoned that I wouldn’t feel quite as devastated if they ended up in the trash.

Throughout the baking, I kept opening the oven door to check that my rolls were rising. When they finally puffed up, I could hardly wait to taste them. I hoped they’d be good; I didn’t want to think that my grandmother, in whose memory I was doing this, baked lousy bread.

I wasn’t disappointed. Savory and strongly flavored, the rolls were wonderfully hearty, like good country bread. The following Thursday, I used the recipe to bake two wonderful loaves of challah. Since then, I’ve become a little addicted to sourdough, replenishing the starter and baking every week.

They say that the dead know the affairs of the living. Could it be that my grandmother watches me as I try to copy her? If she is, I hope she’s smiling.

***

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• This essay situates the “Nakba,” commemorated today, as an event in Israeli history. [+972]

• Ambassador Michael Oren decries allegedly unfair depictions of Israel in the popular press, particularly as compared to the favorable treatment it received decades ago and despite advances Israel has made toward acknowledging Palestinian rights. [WSJ]

• Rep. Joe Pitts told a constituent that the solution to Mideast peace would be to get Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Chairman Yasser Arafat talking again. Similarly, somebody should tell Metternich to get off his lazy butt and fix the eurozone. [The Hill]

• Friend-of-The-Scroll Amir Mizroch on Israel’s secret, high-tech air force plans. [Wired Danger Room]

• Y-Love, who is black, Hasidic, and a hip-hop star, has announced he is also gay. [Heeb]

This segment from Sunday’s 60 Minutes on the mysterious Turkish imam Fethullah Gulen and his network of charter schools, from Turkey to the United States, is [insert your choice of slang for "incredible"].

Asked by the judges why he only started to lay the blame on Nir two months ago, Maoz said it was because he, Daniel, had a tendency toward pedophilia, something only his brother knew, and he feared that if he turned in his brother his secret would be revealed.

Judge Zvi Segal, head of the panel, was incredulous that anyone would prefer to be tried for murder than reveal such a secret, which, Segal pointed out, Maoz had just revealed himself.

Still, I mean, what are twins for if not taking the heat when you kill your parents?

In Ongoing Court Drama, Identical Twins Accuse Each Other of Parents’ Murder [Haaretz]

The Not-So-Great ‘Dictator’

But here’s the thing: Also included in the envelope (whose return address was one “J.S. Mill” at a very real Upper East Side apartment building) was a short letter in which the sender explains himself:

I apologize for the flyer I sent you recently (“Nice Jewish Boys”) [ed.: you actually sent it along with this]. In retrospect, I feel it was too broad and unfair.

My anger is with Wall Street and the Israeli lobby, both of which I believe are dangerously out of control.

I want, and hope for, only three things:

1. Re-regulation of Wall Street and the banks.

2. No further U.S. troop involvement in the Middle East.

3. The requirement that AIPAC and similar organizations register as a foreign agents [sic] and behave as such.

That’s all I’m after. Too much of my frustration was evident in the flyer I mailed you. It should have been more measured and focused.

[unsigned]

As it happens, AIPAC is a U.S. lobby, not a foreign agent. And many U.S. troops are withdrawing from the Middle East, although I’d guess there are a good portion of Syrians who wish they would pay a visit to their corner of the region.

I do agree that Wall Street and the banks ought to be re-regulated, but I don’t see what the Jews have to do with it. So, dear letter-writer, I want, and only hope for, you to keep your opinions to yourself.

Here’s the full flyer:

Earlier: Taking Pride in Jews in Finance

Forecast for Tunisia

Last week, I spoke to ICG’s Robert Blecher, the lead author, about the report, and alternatives such as unilateral withdrawal and BDS. I asked him about the national-unity coalition, and he replied, “It gives Netanyahu a little bit more maneuver room within the paradigm we’re saying ultimately won’t work.” The interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

Try to sum up the report’s central argument.
The peace process as it has been conceived since 1993 [when the Oslo Accords were signed] cannot produce a durable agreement. There is a desperate need to change the nature of the process in the hope of being able to achieve one. Some problems don’t have solutions, and I think that there is a possibility that this is going to drag on for many more generations. But before we reach that conclusion, I think there are things that can be done.

Why can’t the current path produce a “durable agreement”?
The Israelis have the disincentive of advantage. They’re in a very strong position, and it’s risky and scary and politically dangerous for an Israeli government to move on these issues. On the Palestinian side, there’s the disincentives of disadvantage: they’re so weak and so divided that it’s difficult to imagine what kind of process would yield a result they would consider fair. And then you have the international community, which barely deserves the name: you have a body that is acting in the name of the international community, giving it the legitimacy the name confers, but is essentially laundering U.S. positions. We all know the U.S. is a strategic ally of Israel, and especially in this period, which is called silly season in Washington for a reason, the nature of the balance of power is such that I do not see the possibility of a successful negotiation at all. So you need to begin to change the incentive structure.

How?
On the Israeli side you need to give people a way to imagine that it could work in their interests—that means the national and religious right, the settler community. For the right, language is really important. And security is a regional issue, not a bilateral issue. They’re not completely absent from the process, but they’re being shoehorned in.

On the Palestinian side, if we’re talking about changing the balance, they have to come up with a strategy that makes the status quo a little less comfortable for Israel and the U.S.

So, for example, Prime Minister Fayyad’s state-building had an adverse effect on the peace process (if not on actual Palestinian civil society)?
There are some people who think that the Palestinian Authority itself is an obstacle because it creates a deluxe occupation for the Israelis, because they have somebody doing the day-to-day management while the international community kicks in the money. Other people say that we struggled long and hard and even if we recognize the fact that by running this thing we are relieving our adversary of a certain dilemma, that doesn’t mean getting rid of it is good. My own position is that both of those are probably shortsighted. I can imagine why you would want to change the function of the P.A., but who’s going to switch the light off and close the door?

It is catastrophic for a national movement not to be a national movement. Popular resistance is completely hostage to the division between the West Bank and Gaza.

So you’re saying unity between the Palestinian moderates and extremists is essential.
I’m not a fan of the moderate-extremist division. On which issues are people extremists and are they aren’t? When you get to the official positions of the movements, it becomes rather tricky to make distinctions. [Hamas leader Khaled] Meshaal and the official position has talked about ‘67 borders. There are relatively few things that Fatah has said that Hamas has not said. On refugees, Fatah’s official position is right of return to the hilt. Fatah as a movement has never recognized Israel and certainly not the Jewish state of Israel.

I don’t know if Israel will be able to make peace with a Palestinian national movement that includes Hamas. But what I am 100 percent certain of is that it will not be able to make peace with a national movement that does not include Hamas. They are a very solid part of the Palestinian political spectrum. To freeze them out, you’re declaring defeat at the beginning.

One alternative to a negotiated two-state solution, some say, is unilateral Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank settlements. Why do you reject that?
In terms of achieving a lasting solution, it’s not going to get you one. From the position of Israel, I can understand how that could be an attractive option—if you leave the army deployed; the understanding would be that once there is a negotiated agreement, then the army withdraws. But if you look at what happened in Gaza, they don’t want that to happen again, with rockets on the center of Israel instead of the south.

Furthermore, it will not satisfy minimum Palestinian demands. They will continue to see the settlements that remain in place; they will see that Jerusalem is more firmly under Israel’s control; all the final-status issues, with an exception of a portion of the territorial issue, are going to remain. And it will become deeper and deeper. I am not a technological determinist—one of those people who say at a certain point a two-state solution will become impossible because of the number of settlers or acres, because I think what is done through political will can be reversed through political will. But having said that, if you’re talking about a long-term situation, and Israel is continuing to do what it does in Jerusalem and the parts of the West Bank it wants to hold onto, people are going to say, ‘This is not working.’

What can the United States do to facilitate this? What about American Jews? How do you feel about boycotts and the like?
I think BDS is a tactic, not a strategy, and it’s difficult for me to see where it gets Palestinians absent an effective leadership. And I’d say the same thing about other kinds of international involvement as well. If the U.S. suddenly shifted position, it’s not going to bring Israel with it immediately. For me, I’m very focused on the local dimension of the politics.

Does the new national-unity coalition alter the calculus?
It gives Netanyahu a little bit more maneuver room within the paradigm we’re saying ultimately won’t work. I don’t think the problem is with any Israeli coalition.

When Netanyahu comes up with this stuff, I do not think he is inventing issues in order to block progress. He is speaking for a substantial percentage of the Israeli electorate. When he says that the fundamental problem is the lack of acceptance of the Jewish state in the region, that is a mainstream perception there. And on the other side, when it comes to the refugees, for a lot of Palestinians, what is primary for them is the refugee issue. If the two-state solution could accommodate a reasonable solution for the refugees, then fine. If it won’t, then they’re like, ‘Forget it.’

The Emperor Has No Clothes [ICG]
Earlier: Statement Offers Rare Peace Process Hope

Either way, this Kike guy is definitely breaking the rules.

A Case for Genetic Jewishness

The logic goes like this: the P5+1 negotiations are focused primarily on uranium enrichment and are overlooking the explicitly (and allegedly) military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program, which appear to be proved by such things as yesterday’s leak. U.S. expert Anthony Cordesman’s new report has received much attention in Israel. “The threat Iran’s nuclear efforts pose are not simply a matter of its present ability to enrich uranium to 20 percent U-235,” Cordesman argues, “and efforts to control its enrichment activities will not halt its ability to move forward in many areas even if its current enrichment facilities and stocks of highly enriched uranium are fully secured.” (David Albright said much the same in The Scroll last Friday: “If Iran showed in a verifiable way that it wasn’t going to build nuclear weapons,” he noted, “people wouldn’t care so much about centrifuges.”) Cordesman also convincingly lays out the case, based on prior international inspectors’ reports, that the program includes a military component.

Under Israeli thinking, a P5+1 deal on enrichment is a dialectical step backward, because it will reward Tehran and create international complacence, which will in turn weaken the sanctions that have so far effectively slowed Iran. As Defense Minister Barak put it, “If the demands are expressed in the minimalistic manner which we suspect, Iran could agree to all of them, and still be able to continue progressing toward a nuclear weapon.” A senior Israeli official, who for all we know is also Barak, added, “Israel’s main concern is if the talks lead to the stop of Iran’s nuclear program, or create a platform that buys Iran time, while eroding sanctions.” He concluded: “The recent positive statements made by Iran are meant to create an impression of moderation and bolster relations with the world powers, but there is no real fundamental change in Tehran.”

So, what are the plausible alternatives? Here are two different models. Patrick Clawson argues that the sanctions-negotiations balancing act needs to be accompanied by greater support for pro-democracy groups in Iran that may eventually lead to a new regime. “A democratic Iran would likely drop state support for terrorism and end its interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, improving stability in the Middle East,” Clawson argues. “And although Iran’s strongly nationalist democrats are proud of the country’s nuclear progress, their priority is to rejoin the community of nations, so they will likely agree to peaceful nuclearization in exchange for an end to their country’s isolation.” On the other hand, Mehdi Khalaji proposes something of an opposite route, in which the United States goes out of its way to insist that it is not even thinking of regime change in order to give Ayatollah Khamanei the peace of mind—and the domestic victory—that will allow him to compromise.

Reports such as this one that Iran is getting what it wants could be designed to open such political space. But it also could worry Israel.

Meanwhile, though, columnist David Ignatius may be an uncharacteristic step behind in lauding the potential for a deal on enrichment. The potential is certainly there, but it may not be enough. If he is reflecting U.S. thinking, then the administration had better wake up to the concerns of Israel’s government, which is newly strengthened but still evidently as worried as ever.

Drawing Shows Iran Has Chamber Used for Nuke Arms Work [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]
Israel Fears Nuclear Deal Between Iran, World Powers as Baghdad Talks Draw Near [Haaretz]
A Compelling Plan for Iranian Talks [WP]
Sanctions Are Only a Stop-Gap [Foreign Affairs]
The Ayatollah Contemplates Compromise [The Washington Institute for Middle East Policy]
Earlier: Cleansing Suggests Iranian Military Program

• Iran is claiming that the series of P5+1 talks are a success, as they are buying Iran time to continue enriching. It makes you wonder why Iran is bragging about this, though. [NYT]

• The MEK, a controversial Iranian separatist group that has allegedly worked with Israel on nuclear-scientist assassinations and other operations, may soon be lifted from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups—a move that won’t endear the administration to Iran’s government. [WSJ]

• Meanwhile, Iran executed a man it said was a Mossad agent. [NYT]

• And Turkey captured its own Mossad operative: a, um, dead bird. [Elder of Ziyon]

• Cleveland’s Michael Siegal has been tapped for chairman of the board of Federation. [JTA]

For a dash of optimism, though, one could do worse than to look to Libya’s North African neighbor to the west: Tunisia, the country actually responsible for kicking off this season of Arab revolutions. And if current trends in the region persist, it may be the only country of the Arab Spring that doesn’t slip back into winter.

It all started in the economically depressed town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, when a fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi poured gasoline over his head and set himself on fire in front of city hall. Too cash-strapped to purchase a license, he plunged into despair when a municipal employee confiscated his scale and made it all but impossible for him to eke out even the meagerest living. Bouazizi’s suicide galvanized the locals into an uprising that swept across the countryside and eventually reached the capital, Tunis, where, just four weeks later, it toppled the crooked and authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Months of precarious instability followed, but hopes were raised, too. Interim leader Fouad Mebazaa promised “a better political life which will include democracy, plurality, and active participation for all the children of Tunis.” Genuinely free and fair elections were held in October 2011.

As in Egypt, more than 100 political parties stood for election. Also as in Egypt, the Islamists were the best organized. Ennahda, a party led by radical activist Rached Ghannouchi, who spent 23 years in exile in Britain, won 42 percent of the vote.

For secular democrats, the results were both disheartening and encouraging. Disheartening because even though Ennahda ran on a relatively moderate platform—emphasizing jobs and religious freedom rather than political Islam—at the end of the day, the party’s leaders are Islamists, and they won more votes than anyone else. But it was also encouraging because they won less than half the votes and were forced into a coalition government with secular liberal parties.

Though the current government is temporary, it has the critical task of writing the new constitution. And last month, Ennahda’s leaders formally announced that they would not push for Islamic law, or Sharia, to be cited as even a source—let alone the source—of legislation in the new constitution.

This is an enormous step for an avowedly Islamist party, but we’ll see if it’s sincere. Are Tunisia’s Islamists capable of long-term moderation and power-sharing? Or are they simply being shrewd—saying the right things in order to bide their time until next year’s election, when they can consolidate more power? The answer will determine if Tunisia will actually transition to a liberal democracy or if theocracy is boiling slowly.

“Every Islamist in the world has the same ambition—the Islamization of the society,” I was told by Rami Sghayier, a young activist who works with Amnesty International. “A moderate doesn’t mind if it takes 10 or 20 years. An extremist wants it now. That’s the difference.”

***

I spent most of this March and part of April in Tunisia, but you hardly need that long to realize that the country is paradisiacal compared with its violent, dysfunctional neighbors. It even competes with southern Europe as a worthy destination in and of itself, with millions of tourists visiting each year. Whole swaths of the capital Tunis could easily be mistaken for France if you didn’t know better.

Indeed, Tunisia has been more European than any other country in the region since ancient times, beginning with colonization by the Roman Empire and continuing through its rule by the Byzantines, its relatively weak Arabization in the 7th century, and more recently during the period of French rule through the middle of the 20th century. The nation’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, took power in 1956 when the French imperialists left, and he was always more like modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk than any head of state in an Arabic-speaking country. He forged a thoroughly secular government, dismissing the veil as “that odious rag” and banning it from schools and official buildings. He granted equal rights to women and oriented his country northward toward Europe rather than sideways toward Libya and Algeria.

Though he ruled as a dictator, Bourguiba always retained a solid base of support in the cosmopolitan coastal areas where most people in the country of 10 million live. And while he gave the opposition, particularly the Islamists, little political freedom, he did other things right. The majority of citizens became middle class after he scrapped his brief and botched experiment with socialist economics. After being forced to flee almost everywhere else in the Middle East and North Africa, 1,500 Jews in Tunisia remained as a protected minority.

It’s no wonder, then, that Tunisian society is accustomed to secularism and generally dubious of religious zealotry. While a large minority voted for Ennahda, many did so because the party candidates said that, rather than imposing clerical rule, they merely wished to repeal Bourguiba’s anti-religious edicts, such as the banning of headscarves in schools.

Ennahda has had to adjust to Tunisian society’s moderation in order to maintain popularity (hence their abandonment of a Sharia-based legal framework). Yet party officials I spoke to during my month-long trip there this spring were clearly trying to soften the impression of significant change. “This was an internal decision by Ennahda,” Houcine Jaziri, a member of the party and the secretary of state for emigration and Tunisians abroad, told me in his office in Tunis. “We never called for Sharia in Tunisian society anyway. We always called for a civil [secular] state.” Except this is not true. Ennahda officials were contradictory and vague on this point during the election and afterward, presumably because they knew perfectly well that the society as a whole was not yearning for political Islamization and were unsure they could win that fight with their coalition partners.

Ennahda’s leadership itself is divided into at least three separate factions. One segment wants Islamic law, full stop. Another is comfortable with a mixture of Islamic and secular law. A third faction—the one that ultimately came out on top in an internal struggle—has resigned itself to the fact that Sharia law may be impossible in Tunisia unless it can be imposed at gunpoint and thinks the party should drop it altogether or suffer egregiously at the polls. Even party head Rached Ghannouchi now says he does not want Sharia.

“Tunisia is a centrist country,” Jaziri told me. “Ennahda is being brave by not applying Sharia in the constitution.” This is an amazingly vague statement. Did he mean Ennahda was brave for standing up to the Salafists and its own internal hard-liners? Or that the Islamists are brave for trusting Tunisians to behave decently without clerical rule? He was evasive when I pressed the point but reminded me that religious values can and likely will inspire secular laws just as they do in countries such as the United States. “Laws regulating inheritance and so on,” he said, “will have Islam as a reference.”

Indeed, lest one get the wrong idea, it must be said: Many Tunisians do want an Islamic state. The Salafists desperately want one, of course, and they have Saudi Arabia in mind as a model. The hard right-wingers of Ennahda want an Islamist state, too. Others, mostly simple people in the conservative countryside, are drawn to the idea, but they have little understanding of how an Islamic state would actually work.

“Sharia is a very strong word,” Raja Ben Slama, a literature professor at the University of Tunis and a women’s rights activist, told me. “But it doesn’t mean anything in particular. There are two segments in Tunisia who want it. First there’s the segment that doesn’t know what it means. They’re fascinated by the word ‘Sharia’ because it refers to God and to Islam, so they like it even though they don’t know what it is. The other segment, the politicized one, knows what it is and knows why it wants it.”

“Sharia is human law,” Zeyneb Farhat, the director of Tunisia’s national theater, El Teatro, said to me over a bottle of wine at an Italian restaurant. “It is based on a human reading of the Quran. And there are 100 different schools of thought. So, what does Sharia even mean? To some Sharia means Islam while secularism means atheism. Ennahda does everything it can to promote this confusion.”

Continue reading: Learning tough lessons

Jews, the work of Ostrer’s group and another team found, are as closely related genetically as would be expected for typical fourth or fifth cousins. “I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest,” Ostrer told Science magazine at the time.

Ostrer’s new book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, goes further, making a convincing case that there is, in fact, a biological basis for Jewishness: “[Jews] can be said to be a people with a shared genetic legacy,” he writes, “although not all Jews share the same genes, nor is having part of that legacy a requirement for being Jewish.” Although Ostrer gathers the evidence succinctly, the book is unlikely to sway his most ardent critics, scientists such as Tel Aviv University’s Shlomo Sand, the historian who invoked Hitler’s memory to describe Ostrer’s research. But that may not be Ostrer’s main goal. For non-scientists who are curious about their genetic heritage, the book will open up rich avenues of exploration, along with a history lesson about the development of modern genetics—as well as provocative discussion about how the choices Jews are making today about their mates and their children will affect the future of Jewish genetics: Even as Ostrer argues for Jews’ common biological history, he sees the future of Jewish genetics going in a very different direction.

Over the past century, the sometimes-arcane debate within the scientific community over whether Jewishness is biological or cultural has been almost Talmudic, with various groups interpreting the data in different ways. Jews have higher IQs than others, some research has found, suggesting a genetic link among Jews; or maybe, other research has countered, that’s only because Jews have learned to take IQ tests better. Jews have a higher incidence of mental illness, or maybe only certain kinds of mental illness, depending on the study. In many cases, when researchers thought they had found some real biological trait more common among Jews, they realized later that they had “keys under the streetlight syndrome”—“ascertainment bias,” in scientist speak: If you’re only looking under the streetlight for your keys, that seems to be the only place you ever find them. In other words, when scientists start their research by looking for more evidence to confirm something they already think is true, they can be less likely to take other explanations into account, making their conclusions misleading.

The ability to sequence genomes quickly and more and more cheaply has accelerated the field in recent years, leading to new theories. Sand, for example, argues that today’s Jews are all descended from Khazars, an idea Ostrer finds unsupported by the evidence, as he explains in the book. And for some researchers, the question of “who is a genetic Jew” is less important than “who has Jewish genetic diseases,” since a major part of what Jews think about in terms of their genes involves Canavan, Gaucher, and Tay-Sachs diseases, and risk factors such as BRCA, a genetic mutation linked to breast cancer. (It’s not just Jews who are wondering what’s in their genes, of course, as books such as Robert Klitzman’s Am I My Genes? make clear.)

In Legacy, Ostrer traces a century of physical anthropology and genetic research, with all of its twists and turns, and sometimes heated political battles. Ostrer’s book is very much focused on the science and scientists. He explains that he abandoned his plans to write about patients and genealogists in favor of telling the stories of “scientists and physicians who made the discoveries.” The approach allows him to follow the science more closely, although it sacrifices some of the narratives that may connect with readers. Ostrer clearly knows his subject inside and out, and it shows, but readers may find themselves wishing he had replaced some of the details about experiments and genetic theories with stories of some of the people with these genetic traits.

Ostrer takes plenty of opportunities to tie history and culture to science, however. English majors may remember Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s last completed novel, whose protagonist becomes Jewish after rescuing a Jewish singer from suicide. Reading Eliot’s book was a life-changing event for one of the main subjects in Ostrer’s book, physical anthropologist Joseph Jacobs. In the 1880s, Jacobs, who became editor of The Jewish Encyclopedia, used knowledge gleaned from an apprenticeship with Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, to study physical characteristics of Jews and conclude that they were, in fact, a race. Based on Jews’ physical characteristics, Jacobs wrote in The Jewish Encyclopedia: “The remarkable unity of resemblance among Jews, even in different climes, seems to imply a common descent.” And yet Jacobs’ claims were opposed to those of Maurice Fishberg, his contemporary. Somehow, despite saying that “one can pick out a Jew from among a thousand non-Jews without difficulty,” Fishberg rejected the concept of a Jewish race. There had been too much intermingling with gentiles, he said.

Neither Jacobs nor Fishberg, however, had the genetic tools necessary to dive deep into the molecular underpinnings of genealogy. (In fact, they both died decades before the discovery of DNA.) In the last two decades, scientists have used the male-only Y chromosome to speculate about the origins of Cohanim, at one point excitedly announcing that they had found evidence that the founder of this genetic line had lived during Temple days. But Ostrer notes that this enthusiasm “has been tempered by other observations,” just as the work of other scientists has been woven into a tapestry that none of them could have imagined in their time.

Continue reading: The future of Jewish genetics

The Nation’s film critic Stuart Klawans began his insightful review of Borat by comparing SBC (as the Brits refer to Baron Cohen perhaps to avoid the accidental conferring of a noble title) to “another English comedian sporting curly hair and a funny mustache,” namely Charles Chaplin. Vulgar and déclassé, popular culture personified, Chaplin was often mistaken for a Jew—not least by the Nazis, who used him as the poster child for the notorious “Ewige Jude” exhibit of 1938. The Dictator, which opens tomorrow, is in some ways, Baron Cohen’s version of Chaplin’s The Great [sic] Dictator, a remarkable would-be political intervention in which the world’s single most famous individual broke both Hollywood and political taboos to directly ridicule Hitler.

Yet SBC is a tough act to follow, even for SBC himself. Da Ali G Show was brilliant. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was pure genius, and Brüno extremely provocative. The Dictator, however, is merely—although at times very—funny.  The spectacle of Admiral General Aladeen, the inanely grinning, alarmingly bearded “Mad Dog of Wadiya,” riding a blond camel down Fifth Avenue flanked by a Praetorian guard of militant houris is an image for the ages. Wadiya (as in “wadiya doin’?”), indeed.

The problem is that, unlike Ali G, Borat, and Brüno, Aladeen is less a force of nature than a scripted performance. Despite Baron Cohen’s insistence on giving interviews in character, The Dictator—directed, like Borat and Brüno, by Larry Charles—is entirely fictional. Da Baron has given up da shtick. Thus, save for a few quick shots in midtown Manhattan, he never mixes it up with unaware civilians and clueless celebs. The closest thing to a stooge in The Dictator is Anna Faris, required to play politically correct straight woman (a Williamsburg-living feminist health food advocate) to the antics of SBC’s wild and crazy North African tyrant.

An expert clown in her own right, Faris was expected to improvise in response to Baron Cohen’s behavior. The star never broke character during the shoot, she told the New York Times, although “I think he enjoyed playing the role.” Faris noted that SBC used his Aladeen persona to, in effect, direct her performance. Much of Baron Cohen’s “improv” involved bizarre insults (“hairy-pitted yeti,” “lesbian hobbit”) or threats of violence: “If I reacted in a way that displayed discomfort, it was like a bulldog with a bone, not letting go.” The strategy was to get under her skin—and to get under ours.

Dedicated to the late Kim Jung Il, haunted by the ghosts of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein (whose alleged romance novel Zabibah and the King was at one point reported as the movie’s source), The Dictator seems, at least on the surface, a satire of oil-rich Arab tyrants. Admiral General Aladeen is an old school secular tyrant (what Marx called an “oriental despot”) and a Borat-style boor. He stages his own rigged Olympics (shooting rivals with the starter’s gun), wreaks havoc in Wadiya’s health clinics by changing the language such that his name becomes the word for both “positive” and “negative,” announces a nuclear weapons program, and cracks himself up when he insists that his enriched uranium is intended for peaceful “clean energy.” This last stunt attracts the attention of the United States, requiring Aladeen and his treacherous uncle Tamir (Ben Kingsley) to address the United Nations.

SBC gets maximum mileage out of a juicy Arab accent. But mainly he puts the “infantile” in the fantasy of infantile omnipotence. (Aladeen has a harem of paid super-celebrities—we see Megan Fox, who plays herself, leaving his bed, and refusing his offer to “cuddle,” because she has an early morning appointment with the Italian prime minister.) Just about every bodily function gets some airtime. Offensive ethnic stereotypes rule and questionable Jewish material is never far from the surface—first erupting when Aladeen amuses himself by playing a Munich Olympics videogame with sound effects that include shouts of “meshuganah” and “oy vey.” It’s a shocking joke that jolts one into realizing that the powerful opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Munich was also a form of entertainment and perhaps even inadvertent terrorist porn.

Although designed to offend Arab and Jew alike, The Dictator lacks the conceptual rigor of Borat or Brüno (which in its purposefully idiotic way attempted to negotiate the divide between Israelis and Palestinians). Borat, which allowed Baron Cohen to simultaneously play a crypto-Jewish outsider and a blithely offensive anti-Semite, managed to simultaneously exploit American friendliness and expose American nativism. Brüno burlesqued homophobia the way Borat did xenophobia.

Unlike Chaplin’s film, The Dictator is not really addressing a political crisis: The film has little relevance to either the Arab Spring or the conflict between Israel and Iran. Nor does Baron Cohen have any particular interest in employing the innocent double as a mouthpiece. Chaplin used the barber to deliver a sentimental anti-fascist speech at the end of The Great Dictator; in the The Dictator, it’s Aladeen who breaks (or at least cracks) the proscenium to make a blunt political statement—not about the Middle East but the inequities of American society.

SBC’s humor thrives on inadvertent disclosure and his essential subject is the Land of the Free. No less than the grotesque greenhorn Borat and over-civilized European Brüno, Aladeen is a stranger in our strange land. (“Twenty dollars a day for Wi-Fi,” he exclaims on checking into a posh midtown hotel. “And they call me an international criminal!”) Confined by a conventional narrative, The Dictator at times resembles the John Landis-Eddie Murphy fish-out-of-water comedies of the mid ‘80s, Trading Places and Coming to America—although SBC’s Aladeen is at once more hapless and offensive than Murphy. In the riotous aftermath of an anti-Aladeen demonstration, he’s rescued by fellow demonstrator Zoey (Faris) and taken to work in her Williamsburg organic food co-op. Patronized by self-important bobos and staffed by Third World political ’fugees, the place is basically a barrel full of fish for Baron Cohen to shoot at will. Alternately crude and clueless, Aladeen even enters into a sort of relationship with Zoey. Weary of his importuning, she encourages him to masturbate; the ensuing orgasmic epiphany (compete with interpolated shot from Forrest Gump) improves his personality … but only slightly.

The gross-out set pieces are memorable (Aladeen “helping” to “deliver” a baby on the food co-op floor, losing his cellphone in the birth canal and bellowing, “It’s a girl—where’s the trash can?”) But The Dictator basically exists as a frame for two notable dialogue-driven scenes. The first is Aladeen’s defense of dictatorship and explication of its benefits, in terms mirroring an Occupy Wall Street analysis of American society. The second, far trickier to parse, has Aladeen and his nuclear expert Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas) taking a tourist helicopter ride over Manhattan.

High above the city, the two Wadiyans engage in an extended conversation in their native language—translated in subtitles—that, replete with references to the Porsche model 911 and various New York landmarks, sends their fellow passengers into freak-out hysteria of immanent terror attack. Thus, only a few weeks after The Avengers orchestrated a comic-book version of 9/11 as its great finale to awesome success (and, as noted elsewhere, remarkably little comment), Baron Cohen evokes the catastrophe with a complex linguistic gag. The secret language Aladeen and Nadal are speaking is in large part Hebrew; the scene manages to parody both Arabophobia as well as the conspiratorial assertion that the attack on the World Trade Center was plotted by Jews. (Later, in case we missed the point, the two Wadiyans engage in a Yiddish slanging riff.)

Like all true stars Baron Cohen resolves contradictions: Brüno was at once a narcissistic celebrity and a frantic wannabe; Borat was both a crypto Jew and a rabid Jew-baiter. SBC himself could be described as an amoral moralist, a shy exhibitionist, and an equal opportunity bigot—although it’s worth noting that, like Borat, The Dictator is free of Muslim baiting. As a performer, Baron Cohen is more calculatedly offensive than Howard Stern and yet so stupidly “innocent” he manages to be lovable in a way that Stern could never be. In a final gag, Zoey turns out to be “Jewish” too. The joke’s on Aladeen—and on us.

***

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• Occasional Scroll correspondent Anthony Cordesmann has a new report arguing there is very little sense in doubting that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has a military component. [Haaretz The Axis]

• In the course of reporting anti-Semitism at the BBC, Walter Russell Mead offers an eloquent case that anti-Semitism threatens more than just Jews. [Via Meadia]

• Todd Gitlin commemorates the Port Huron Statement. [Forward]

• “Can you believe it out here at the Western Wall? So much sun! And such a draft, too—switch chairs with me, will ya?” [Haaretz]

• Seven artists, including Art Spiegelman, pay tribute to the late Maurice Sendak. [NYT Week in Review]

Peter Berg, director of the new Battleship (starring Rihanna!?), wants you to join the IDF.

Conservative pundit Timothy P. Carney begins his column on this subject by citing a line Rahm Emanuel apparently quipped back in 1992: “Gays are the next Jews of fundraising.” In more words, they are disproportionately wealthy, politically engaged, and Democratic, and can be massaged on a few issues or even one issue of particular resonance to them. “In that light,” Carney argues, “Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage was at least the equivalent of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—a symbolic and controversial action that excites a donor base.” (Indeed, in mere months Obama has moved from first Jewish president to first gay president. No word on whether he remains the first black president excepting Bill Clinton.)

Here’s the difference. Gay rights is the signal issue for most gay donors, and so the Democrats are undoubtedly their party. But if support for Israel—and specifically the throw-caution-to-the-wind, out-and-out support for Israel that would be embodied by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (something the past three presidents have failed to do despite ostensible legislative obligation)—were the signal issue for Jewish donors, then they would be flooding to the Republicans; and yet, with a few notable exceptions (Sheldon Adelson, Irving Moskowitz, these folks), they haven’t. Despite a bipartisan consensus on Israel that, where it favors one side at all, probably favors Republicans more than Democrats (particularly among the wealthy), Jews overwhelmingly stick with Democrats.

Extrapolating from donors to voters only makes things more interesting. Four percent of the population identifies as LGBT—roughly twice the number who identify as Jews. Right now, when one party is trying to grant them more rights and the other is trying to circumscribe them, you can expect overwhelming Democratic support. Certainly you’d expect that a higher proportion of gays than Jews would vote for the Democrat, right? Well, in 2008, you would’ve been wrong: 27 percent of gays voted for Sen. John McCain, as opposed to 22 percent of Jews.

Maybe that number will go down this year given Obama’s announcement, but in terms of a longer trend, it implies that eventually the gay vote—at least the gay male vote—will be very much up-for-grabs. And why shouldn’t it be? Fifty, 30, or even 20 years from now, both parties will support gay rights, at least on its face, and the issue will be largely uncontroversial. (Put it this way: In 50 years, I’d bet Democrats won’t make the same charges against Republicans about gays that they do now about women.) At that point, roughly half of the gay population will be men who are disproportionately wealthy; disproportionately childless; and likely less concerned with social issues, their primary one having been resolved. And what do we call wealthy American men who care about economic policies with a limited personal commitment to public education? Usually, we call them Republicans. (I’d expect lesbians to remain a strongly Democratic group, in part because they’re women.)

Most likely, gay Americans, like practically all Americans, will vote their self-interest and evolve across parties accordingly. There will be only one bizarre outlier that will continue, as Milton Himmelfarb put it 60 years ago, to “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”

Gay Marriage Shows How Social Issues Pay for Dems [Washington Examiner]

The Feminist Marriage Plot

Thing is, she has a point! 1957′s “Ali Baba Bunny” is a little problematic! So is the one where Yosemite Sam is Arab (“Sahara Hare”). But of course, these were far from the most racist Bugs Bunny cartoons, and they all were created more than a half-century ago. As to Deek’s charge that “the Department of Defense finances such films in order to increase suspicion towards our community in America and abroad,” I hope she wasn’t referring to Merrie Melodies, which has no visible connection to the Pentagon; in fact, its predecessor, the War Department, famously went after Bugs in “Rebel Rabbit.”

Deek muses, “I’m talking about the corporations involved in national security and wars, along with Zionist and Israeli institutions … I’m talking about Zionist Christians.” She should be condemned for paranoid anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing, but also urged to leave the Christians out of it: Judging from his Mel Blanc-gifted accent, Bugs hails from a part of Brooklyn not known for its Christians; and you’ll note at the conclusion of “Sahara Hare” that Bugs’ frequent partner-in-crime Daffy Duck emerges in the desert, sees nothing but sand for miles, and assumes, excitedly, that he’s in Miami Beach.

Bugs Bunny Targes Muslims, Says Lawyer on Egyptian TV [Arutz Sheva]
Related: Cartoons of a Racist Past Lurk on YouTube [NYT]
The Voice [Tablet Magazine]

But this week’s has to do with more secular rabbis: It’s that of Laurie Pila and Gregory Sheindlin, whose Saturday wedding was officiated by the groom’s father and stepmother, both of whom are judges. In fact, Jerry Sheindlin succeeded Hizzoner himself as the presiding judge on The People’s Court, from 1999 to 2001. I think the stepmother’s been on television too.

Meanwhile, the groom’s an attorney, the bride a video producer. No judging. Mazel tov to the happy couple!

Laurie Pila and Gregory Sheindlin [NYT]

Old Jews Telling More Jokes

But the bigger news is that Manchester City, which is roughly the Mets to Manchester United’s Yankees (except they’re even worse), won its first EPL championship in its 44 years of existence. It did so by scoring two goals, one to tie and the other to win, in merely the five minutes of injury time, helped in part by the fact that its opponent had only 10 men on the field for the rest of the game due to an ejection, because, you know, soccer. What the article fails to note—and what I happen to know because (and only because) he is a subject in the forthcoming Jewish Jocks—is that the retired Israeli midfielder Eyal Berkovic played a crucial role in getting Man City promoted into the EPL in the early 2000s. So, without him, nothing.

Thus concludes the last soccer-related post you’ll likely see on The Scroll … until the Olympics in a few months.

Benayoun Scores Key Goal as Arsenal Win [Forward]
After 44 Years, Manchester City Wins Premiership [IHT]
Related: Israel’s Arab-Free Soccer Team [Tablet Magazine]

Israel’s Arab-Free Soccer Team

Also this weekend, Netanyahu pressured members of his own party—in a sign that with the new coalition he feels more secure leading a Likud Party that is to the right of himself—to block a bill that would apply Israeli civil instead of military law to settlements, effectively annexing them. It’s a real setback for Rep. Joe Walsh, Republican from Illinois, who advocates a full-on one-state solution. And it’s something of a victory for Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who apparently has come to see himself as something like a Moses, in the sense of leading his people to the mountaintop but not crossing the river with them. “There will come a time when an Israeli leadership has to sell an agreement to its public,” Fayyad told The New Republic‘s Ben Birnbaum. “Imagine how much easier it would be for that leadership if it’s able to assert to the public, ‘What is the argument about? It’”—a Palestinian state—“’exists already.’”

Of course, this could all unravel very quickly. Some of the Palestinian hunger-striking prisoners are approaching 80 days, and while a deal is said to be imminent, one hasn’t been reached yet. And tomorrow is Nakba Day. It could be bad, it could be hopeful, and most likely it will be just another Tuesday.

Netanyahu to Abbas: Israeli Unity Cabinet Can Advance Mideast Peace [Haaretz]
In About-Face, Israeli Ministers Block Bill to Annex West Bank Settlements [Haaretz]
Myth of a Two-State Solution [Washington Times]
The Visionary [TNR]

• David Ignatius lays out the expected parameters of the next phase of the nuclear negotiations—under five percent enriched uranium in exchange for fuel rods—as well as a possible long-term resolution, in which a “firewall” exists between a permitted civilian program and an illicit military one. [WP]

• Meanwhile, Iranian oil tankers are switching off their satellite tracking systems (which is illegal) in a sign of how difficult they are finding places to unload their cargo due to sanctions. [WP]

• Speaking of, the European Union upped sanctions against Syria. [EU]

• A good primer on the emotional, “culture war”-style stakes of the Tal Law debate, which was re-joined with the formation of the new Israeli government. [WP]

• Fear of war-crimes lawsuits are an increasing motivator of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s behavior, from ordering the evacuation of a briefly occupied house in Hebron last month to likely not prolonging the court-ordered razing of the Ulpana neighborhood in a West Bank settlement. [WP]

The novel tells of Heather and Mack, a couple that seems to have it all: She’s good looking, he’s financially successful, and together they have two kids and a beautiful house in the suburbs. But from the outset the reader senses frustration and discontent festering behind the white picket fence. While Mack takes lengthy business trips away from home, Heather recalls with nostalgia and not a little regret her post-college career in the publishing industry, and the path toward literary success that she veered away from by getting married and having kids. Shulman’s novel raises important questions about our expectations of marriage in the 21st century and has surprising implications for the Orthodox approach to matrimony.

***

Questions of marriage have long occupied Shulman, who first made waves with her essay “A Marriage Agreement” in 1972. Written as a contract of sorts, the agreement laid out the terms for a fair division of labor between husband and wife in all matters relating to household chores and childcare. While ostensibly written to address her own marriage—which eventually ended in divorce—the agreement was widely read and drew strong reactions, including, famously, a mocking critique from Norman Mailer who insisted that he would not be married to such a woman. For Mailer, the idea of helping his wife with the dishes—and allowing his own work to suffer as a result—was anathema. Shulman revisited the essay in a 1998 piece called “Marriage Disagreement,” where, in response to Mailer’s critique, she noted that according to the agreement’s foundational principle “a woman’s work was, by definition, as valuable as a man’s.”

But it was her novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen that brought her literary stardom and fame. Covering many hot-button issues of the feminist movement, the book focused in particular on the ways in which women are objectified. Recounting her tale of adventure and misadventure, the heroine, Sasha Davis, repeats over and over again what she has imbibed from those around her—her mother, lovers, female rivals—that her “looks were everything,” they were her “only asset.” And, as looks will, they were fast slipping away.

In her newest book, the plot thickens when Mack, in a quest to assert himself and also provide for his wife, invites an enigmatic, sexy, European writer to take up residence in the family home—in exchange for keeping Heather company, “intellectually,” of course. While the plot ultimately falls flat, Shulman powerfully evokes her heroine’s sense of entrapment in what, to all outer appearances, would seem an ideal marriage. In reality, Mack is unfaithful while away, and Heather, alone at home, simmers with suspicion and resentment. More than once, she imagines her husband dead, a thought she finds not altogether unappealing: “If Mack died, she would sell the house and live off the proceeds—buy herself a loft, eat brunches at Balthazar, shop at the Farmers’ Market, cruise the Chelsea galleries.” On another occasion, the sound of the phone ringing, late at night, while Mack is away, sends Heather into a panic: “Emergency? An official announcement of Mack’s sudden death? She hoped she hoped not, but wouldn’t bet on it.” She continues:

His death would certainly shake things up, lift the doubt that had settled over her like mist in the valley, allowing her to see ahead to some decisive act. If he suddenly died she’d sell the house, buy a condo in the city, find a good school for the kids and enroll in the best MFA program she could get into. Or take a live-in-lover and stay on here to write. If their father died in an accident, the children couldn’t blame her—how often did they see him anyway?—though part of her believed there are no accidents.

As in “Memoirs” in her latest novel, too, Shulman writes of feminine beauty as a sort of double-edged sword in a world where sexiness and seriousness are often seen as mutually exclusive—for women. You might think that in religious circles physical appearances would count for less, but in a world where mingling of the sexes is mostly verboten, looks—which constitute first impressions, for better or worse—do matter, very much so. Ten years later, I’m still horrified to recall the time I went to shul on a Friday night for the express purpose of having someone—the sister of a potential date—check me out. Given that the whole dating process was shrouded in secrecy she would not approach me, even to make small talk. And so, there I stood, me and my wares—made up, nicely dressed, heels and all—pretending not to watch as she sized me up.

A friend who is raising two young daughters in a Modern Orthodox community worries that the truths—about marriage and family—that she grew up with won’t hold water for her own kids. Given the scarcity of eligible men today, she laments, what are the odds of her daughters finding their besherts, and should she, as a responsible mother, be providing her daughters with the tools that will make them happy, productive women whether or not they ever wed?

I married a man I adore—without the help of a matchmaker, or a meddlesome sister—and not long afterwards gave birth to our son. I love my husband and son dearly, but God help me (or all three of us) if my happiness was based on them.

Still, when I spend time with my single female friends, I find myself struck with the urge to fix them up. Even as I envy them their freedom, it’s hard to shake off the notion—ingrained in me since childhood—that marriage is a cure-all for life’s ills. I was raised to believe getting married and having children was the surest way—the only way—to secure one’s happiness. And despite my growing conviction that happiness is a state of mind that has little to do with marital status, I want to believe that by pairing up my friends with Mr. Right I can help them find fulfillment.

***

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Netanyahu was reacting to only the latest in a series of violent soccer-related incidents. Two days prior, a fight between players and even coaches following a match between a predominantly Arab team from Lod and Hapoel Ramat Gan had landed several people in the hospital and others in jail. The Israeli league ended up canceling the next weekend of games while politicians and league officials wrung their hands in despair about the growing trend.

At the end of March, for example, following a 2-1 game won by Maccabi Petah Tikva over Hapoel Haifa, a mass brawl broke out on the field among players and representatives from both teams. Ali Khatib, a midfielder for Haifa and one of many Israeli Arabs now playing in the league, lost consciousness after he was head-butted by the Petah Tikva goalie coach and then kicked while he was on the ground by another opposing team representative. Earlier that month, a riot involving approximately 1,000 fans from Hapoel Tel Aviv took place after a loss to bitter rival Maccabi Tel Aviv. Metal poles were heaved from the stands into the stadium grounds preventing referees and players from reaching their dressing rooms, and 24 were arrested.

The scourge of violence in the soccer world both on and off the field is nothing new, and it’s no surprise that Israel is not immune to the sport’s often brutal culture. But in the Israeli version, the violence is related to the unique political nature of Israeli sports, which is often inseparable from the Israeli politics and the ongoing struggle between Jews and Arabs.

***

Sixty-four years after its founding, Israel has successfully eliminated partisan politics from most sectors of the society, including health, employment, banking, and even the military. (The left-wing Palmach strike-force and right-wing Irgun paramilitary group were disbanded almost immediately following the establishment of the state in 1948.) Sports, however, is the last vestige of a social service in Israel with a strong connection to the political system.

Even the names of the country’s major sports organizations are fraught with political meaning and their leaderships generally strongly reflect party ideology. “Hapoel” (the worker) is affiliated with the Labor Party and Histradut labor union. “Maccabi” is connected to Israel’s center-right. “Betar” is the youth and sports division of the right-wing and ruling political party, Likud. And “Elitzur” is the sports movement of the National Religious Party.

Despite this connection, fans for most teams cut across all sectors of society. Fans of Hapoel Tel Aviv, for example can be rich, poor, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and include Arabs from Jaffa as well. But not all teams have shed their founding organization’s ideology.

More than any other sports team in Israel, the Betar Jerusalem soccer club exemplifies the old-time link between politics and sports. Jeremy Last, former sports editor for the Jerusalem Post and now a sports reporter in Israel for Associated Press, said of Betar: “It’s not just a football team—it’s a political movement.”

Betar’s fans are notorious for their long history of racist behavior directed at Arabs. Their team has been slapped with severe penalties in the past by the soccer league for racist chants and other related violence. After a recent game in March, fans gathered at Jerusalem’s Malcha shopping mall where they brawled with Arab employees and chanted, “Death to the Arabs.” Sixteen youths were subsequently arrested.

Last, the sports reporter, has attended dozens of Betar games over the last seven years. “There is definitely an anti-Arab feeling among a large section of fans who come to the games, which can be seen as a result of the unfortunate political situation,” he told me. “The lack of progress in the peace process creates a great deal of mistrust.”

Betar fans often sing anti-Arab chants, like this one about the Israeli Arab soccer star Salim Tuama, who has also played for the Israeli national team: “What is Salim doing here, I don’t know … Tuama, this is the Land of Israel. Tuama, this is the state of the Jews. I hate you Salim Tuama. I hate all the Arabs.”

Marc Weiss, a local Jerusalem resident, soccer aficionado, and supporter of a local lower-league Jerusalem team, notes that racism directed at African and Arab soccer players has almost disappeared as every team in Israel’s professional league has on its rosters both blacks and Arabs—save for Betar Jerusalem. The team currently has a Nigerian and an Israeli Ethiopian player on its roster and has had other black players on the team in recent years, but it hasn’t yet signed an Arab player.

“It’s more than a little absurd to direct racist comments at blacks or Arabs on the opposing team when you have them playing for your favorite side as well,” Weiss said. Not only are there numerous Israeli Arab players in the top professional league for club teams, but they play for Israel’s team, which gathers together the best Israeli players in the world. There are also Arab clubs in the top professional league. B’nei Sakhnin, a team named for the mixed Christian-Muslim town of 25,000 located in the Lower Galilee, famously won Israel’s prestigious State Cup tournament in 2004 and has been the subject of at least two documentary films. The team is a regular fixture in the league and is finishing this season in eighth place.

As African players have become an integral part of the Betar Jerusalem team, racist chants against blacks have almost disappeared, leading some to conclude that breaking the barrier of signing an Arab player to the Betar roster will go a long way to reducing or eliminating anti-Arab chants as well.

Continue reading: More at stake

Now, at the initiative of Daniel Okrent—the first public editor for the New York Times—and writer and editor Peter Gethers, Old Jews Telling Jokes has been re-purposed as a theatrical production, complete with a narrative through-line and cabaret-style musical numbers. Currently in previews, it opens May 20 at the Westside Theater in Manhattan.

Independent producer Eric Molinsky speaks to Hoffman, Okrent, Gethers, and (old Jewish) actors Marilyn Sokol and Todd Sussman about how a collection of tall tales about rabbis, doctors, and plumbers became a night of musical theater. [Running time: 10:33.]

On The Scroll, Maurice Sendak, z”l. In an extraordinary and shocking (except in hindsight) move, Prime Minister Netanyahu formed a coalition with Kadima, which reminded Liel Leibovitz of the stagnant national-unity governments of the 1980s. David Albright explained what should be most worrying us about Iran’s nuclear program. Based on his advisers, Mitt Romney can be expected to espouse a George W. Bush-style foreign policy.

Barack Obama became the first sitting president to endorse gay marriage.

The election of a left-wing president arguably empowered the far right. And speaking of the far right, check out these Greeks. Al Monitor was profiled, Roman Polanski mocked, baseball player Josh Hamilton unfavorably compared to baseball player Shawn Green. We told Barbra Streisand what she should sing in Brooklyn.

And we jammed to the 10 best Carole King songs you didn’t know are Carole King songs; plus “I Feel the Earth Move,” cause we do.

• Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, a top Likudnik, has come out in favor of freezing construction on the other side of the barrier. “You offer the Palestinians a state,” he said. “But if you build there in every place, you don’t really mean it.” [Times of Israel]

• Yossi Klein Halevi sees the Iran issue—specifically further pressuring the United States not to get bogged down in the negotiations—behind the national-unity coalition. [Foreign Affairs]

• The Anti-Defamation League praises President Obama for affirming his support for gay marriage. [ADL]

• Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah did some more delightful Israel-threatening. [AP/Times of Israel]

• Drake and Rashida Jones?! [Jewcy]

Happy Mother’s Day!

Anyway: Twitter has already provided variants on, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You stole my neighborhood. Give it back.” What do you guys have?

Related: Claire Danes, Mandy Patinkin in Israel To Film ‘Homeland’ [JTA]

Greased, Frightening

This week’s winner is “Etzion,” who, prompted by Simon Yisrael Feuerman’s musings on his minyan, observed, “Even the most established minyanim/shuls, with all of their ‘establishment types,’ have a cast of characters that would be at home at the Star Wars cantina. Yisrael reminds us to exert special effort to see their tzelem Elohim.”

Etzion gets Sherwin B. Nuland’s Maimonides, who I think would agree, and this video:

A Motley Minyan
Maimonides [Nextbook Press]

Yesterday, I spoke to David Albright, the atomic-weapons expert who is ISIS’s founder and head. Similarly to Anthony Cordesman earlier this week, Albright argued that many are focusing on the (still important) question of uranium enrichment and overlooking the issue of a military program. “If Iran showed in a verifiable way that it wasn’t going to build nuclear weapons,” he said, “people wouldn’t care so much about centrifuges.” But, of course, Iran hasn’t showed that. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

What do the photos show?
There was nothing going on outside, and suddenly there’s a stream of water coming from a corner. Water can be used to wash out things—there’s a container in that building that’s used in high-explosives testing. You just don’t know. What we know for sure is that the [International Atomic Energy Agency] wants to visit this place based on evidence that Iran worked on nuclear weapons, high-explosives components, or possibly a neutron initiator there. The main thing is testing nuclear weapons components.

Any activity at the building is gonna make the IAEA nervous, justifiably, because [the Iranians] could be trying to hide evidence of past testing.

Where did you get the photographs?
We buy them from DigitalGlobe.

So the IAEA would have already had these photos and known about them in April, before the talks?
The IAEA knew it. They knew about it before the talks last month. Plus the intelligence agencies have it so they may have shared it.

So what happens next?
It looks like Iran isn’t going to let the IAEA visit, and if it does, the IAEA won’t be able to tell. If they find something then of course they’ll find something, but usually if the place is cleaned up—and Iran knows how to do it, they’ve been caught enough in the past—if they find nothing, you don’t know if there was nothing that really happened. It looks like we won’t get really far on Parchin. Even if they let them go in, we may not get a conclusive result.

Is Parchin especially important?
We don’t think it’s that vital, and it’s gotten a little bit overplayed. Other parts of this need to be focused on, because finally we’re looking for Iran to cooperate. Parchin is like a third rail for them: they freak out when you talk about it; the military may have made decisions about what people can come visit, and it may have nothing to do with nuclear. But there’s a lot of other things that involve suspected nuclear or weaponization work, and what you need is, ‘We’ll answer your question,’ and some of this could be settled in Vienna next week [where IAEA meetings are scheduled].

So it sounds like this is more about symbols of cooperation rather than the facility itself.
It needs to be clear to the Iranians that they need to send a signal soon that they’re willing to be more transparent with the IAEA on questions involving military nuclear programs. We’re worried about a parallel military program—the whole military dimension is important. Parchin may not be the best way to do that anymore.

A main argument used by opponents of striking Iran at the present time is that we have inspectors and satellite photos and the rest, so if Iran’s rulers make the decision to build a nuclear bomb, we will know about it. Does this confirm that argument, since we caught them cleansing their facility? Or does this rebut that argument, because they are clearly up to mischief even with inspectors in the country?
Well, they still have to make enough highly enriched uranium, and right now we’d know if they had. Two years from now, that may not be the case, but this year and well into 2013, we believe we would know.

The covert production right now is less of a worry. Everyone’s watching nervously what’s happening at Fordow, how fast are they increasing the number of centrifuges—and they are, not as fast as they’d like us to believe—and that’s a priority, not to get them to install more and make 20 percent enriched.

But the talks in Vienna Monday and Tuesday are over weaponization. And that’s really the core issue: does Iran intend to build nuclear weapons, not if they’re going to operate centrifuges. If Iran showed in a verifiable way that it wasn’t going to build nuclear weapons, people wouldn’t care so much about centrifuges.

But they do care about centrifuges.
Because there’s evidence they want to build nuclear weapons; they worked on it a lot in the past.

So what’s at stake in Vienna, especially with the next round of P5+1 negotiations in Baghdad coming up?
Iran won’t take the first step, so if this meeting in Vienna ends badly, it’s a bad time for the Baghdad meeting.

The priority is we need to see some breakthrough on their part.

Photos Back U.N. Concerns on Iran [WSJ]
Related: Rethinking Our Approach to Iran’s Search for the Bomb

My Mother’s Loving Silence

I hear that before Twitter, nobody even cared when people died.

— Jonathan Shainin (@jonathanshainin) May 4, 2012

The past week we’ve learned of the deaths of the Beastie Boys co-founder and activist Adam Yauch and legendary children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, two widely respected public figures with generation-spanning followings. We’ve also experienced the resulting deluge of Internet tributes, broadcast most swiftly and simply through the medium of Twitter. Writing in Tablet Magazine about the late Yauch, literary editor David Samuels aptly summarizes what frequently occurs these days when a well-known person dies:

What’s the best thing about celebrity deaths? The million little masturbatory orgies they inspire under the oh-so-respectable blankets of news and analysis. When Billy Joel dies of a heart-attack-ack-ack, we’ll be on it—not because we care about the father of Alexis and ex-husband of Christie, but because we will have just been given a free pass to mourn our lost youths in Massapequa, Long Island, where we slow-danced to “Piano Man” at the prom. The phases of the competitive mourning cycle are all equally loathsome: shock at the loss of an icon, retelling of the heroic career, ironic distance to show that we are now grown-ups, etc.

During these times, it can seem like everyone in your Twitter feed is acting out this cycle at once, with all of the self-consciousness and deeply felt sorrow and homespun witticisms that can be mustered. There is a bludgeoning parade of RIPs—as if that term means anything—and quotations that will be repeated enough to empty them of any profundity.

Twitter is a funeral parlor’s side room for the cool kids. #RIPMCA

— Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) May 4, 2012

Media outlets are equally complicit, scrambling to link to all of their relevant material, assembling pages of remembrance, aggregating tweets from distraught fans and the celebrity’s longtime collaborator. The president might even issue a statement, if the celebrity is sufficiently mainstream.

In recent years, media theorists have seized on Walter J. Ong’s notion of “secondary orality,” which posits that new media reintroduces elements of oral culture similar to those found in traditional, preliterate societies. Secondary orality isn’t quite the same as exchanging news by the village well; instead, it’s “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality.” Nowhere is this more evident than on Twitter, where our speech is chatty, highly social, gossipy, ephemeral, and ironized within an inch of its life.

It’s a perfect representation of the Internet’s new tribalism, and when a celebrity dies, it’s raised to an insufferable level.

Between Yauch and Sendak, not a good week to be a Gen-Xer.

— Gal Beckerman (@galbeckerman) May 8, 2012

It makes for an all-day avalanche of mawkish sentiment and peacocking displays of authentic feeling (see: Samuels’ “competitive mourning cycle”). It reflects the worst side of what is often a great, and even useful and inspiring, medium. Not often have I found that I care what someone thinks of a dead celebrity—what Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” meant to your middle school experience or how Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are changed your childhood. Yet when a celebrity dies, we are all prompted to author our own mini-memoirs.

Much like in oral cultures, where there are no historical records except those passed down in stories, Twitter engenders a sense that if we don’t tweet it, it didn’t happen, we didn’t feel it. No one will know that we hurt, that this person mattered to us too. (And we can’t forget that too small endorphin boost that comes when our tweet, our little capsule of ego, is retweeted or favorited.) On a medium that rewards solipsism, there’s great pressure to be included in the digital shiva—at least until we return to our tweets about how much Mad Men paid for that Beatles song this week ($250k!).

One of Twitter’s flaws is that bad news is passed around with a velocity that can seem like eagerness, even if it’s actually melancholy

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) May 4, 2012

It’s not that I don’t care about these people, what they accomplished, or who they were (though the notion that we ever knew these celebrities as people, or had any sense of who they really were, has always seemed to be another one of the delusions driving celebrity culture). It’s that those feelings become denatured of meaning when aired in 140 characters, particularly when broadcast alongside links to articles about Bashar Assad’s latest massacre or the latest Girls think-piece. The delicate tissue of mourning, of negotiating one’s feelings about an artist or actor, deserves more time and circumspection; it should be shared in person with other human beings, somewhere where it doesn’t exist side-by-side with promoted tweets from Wal-Mart.

Of course, all this spleens amounts to little. This cycle will go on, becoming more cyclonic, more intensely confessional and, for some of us, unbearable. After all, grief is just another meme we pass around. So when the next wave of public mourning hits, I suppose it’ll be time to close the browser window and ignore the endless feed. Maybe I’ll think again about Maurice Sendak, who, in a much different context, once said, “I will be dead. I won’t give a shit.” Maybe I won’t. Either way, no one will know.

Must you ruin everything? RT @GwynethPaltrow: MCA forever.

— Lizzie O’Leary (@lizzieohreally) May 4, 2012

Jacob Silverman writes Jewcy’s ‘Culture Kvetch’ column, which runs twice a month.

Read more like this at Jewcy.com

• Apparently under pressure of maritime insurers, most of which are based there, Britain is pushing for an exemption to the EU’s impending oil embargo whereby insurers could still back ships containing Iranian oil (and bound for, say, China). Remember the good old days, when an embargo was actually an embargo? [NYT]

• In the second part of its big investigation, the Times finds the Brooklyn district attorney is especially lenient when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse from Hasidic communities. [NYT]

• The Israeli cabinet complained that a Supreme Court ruling to dismantle the Ulpana neighborhood in the Beit El settlement made the issue prohibitively difficult to resolve. Well, not if you just follow the court’s order. [Haaretz]

• Hamas’ prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said his group would not retaliate against Israel if Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. [Reuters]

• Yet the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid argues that retaliation would come, in the form of Shia groups spread throughout the region that might target Israeli, U.S., or Western targets in their own countries. [Haaretz]

“Overall, it was a pretty normal trip home.” >>

This year, for the first time, there won’t be any Mother’s Day phone calls. My mother, Rochel Steinmetz, passed away last October. Instead of chatting on the telephone, I will be mourning in silence. Silence is a fitting tribute to my mother, because she understood that sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

***

As a rabbi, I know that mourning and silence go hand in hand. Oftentimes, visitors to shivas feel compelled to speak. After all, the North American cultural bias is to force-feed every social situation with conversation; silences are awkward and unwanted. But shiva houses are different; there are sensitivities to consider, and there is authentic grief in the air. So, when you arrive to speak with the mourner, you’re concerned that what you say might prove to be a faux pas.

For this reason, I often rely on the well-worn cliche, “There are no words.” I’ve gone to hundreds of shiva homes; and there are tragedies so large that it’s impossible to speak without acknowledging all of the pain swirling around the room. Declaring that “there are no words” makes an awkward situation less awkward; suddenly no one has to pretend to comfort, and no one has to pretend to be comforted. Death is final and tragic; nothing anyone ever says can change that. Clever attempts at offering comfort usually fail miserably and are more likely to offend than to console. In a shiva house, words cannot compare to silence.

After my mother’s funeral, I sat shiva for the first time. After having visited hundreds of shivas, this time it was me who sat hunched down in the low chair. Suddenly, the phrase “there are no words” took on new meaning. The Talmud says that upon returning from the cemetery the mourner eats a rounded food (like eggs, lentils, etc.). This is because a mourner “has no mouth,” just like an egg, which is an enclosed circle, without any hint of an opening. During the first few days of shiva, I realized how true this was. Even though I spoke nonstop, words couldn’t express my sense of loss. Inside my 47-year-old body was a 7-year-old-child crying for mommy; and even an ocean of thesauruses could not describe my heart, the heart of a grieving orphan. Silence communicated my feelings better than words.

As the year of mourning presses on, silence has become the playground of memory; I hear my mother’s voice best during moments of silence. And even as I turn my mind to other matters, precious memories turn up, without prompting and without warning, unannounced. They arrive with or without tears, while I’m doing everyday tasks like driving or saying kaddish; suddenly, I’m overwhelmed by how much I miss my mother. And these silent intrusions are actually quite welcome; it’s extremely comforting to know that I can remember my mom without even trying. She is a part of my heart and soul, with or without anything further being said.

While silence is a large part of any mourner’s life, it feels particularly appropriate in my case: Silence was important to my mother, and she made it a large part of my upbringing, as well.

My mother was deported to Auschwitz in 1944; at the time, she was just 16 years old. After the war, she came to America and rapidly rebuilt her life. She got married, bought a house in the suburbs, and had three children. In 1964, when she was eight months pregnant, my father’s car crashed, and her world fell apart. All of sudden, she was a widow and a single mother struggling to get by. And 30 days after my father’s death, my mother gave birth to her fourth child: me.

At my mother’s funeral, an elderly rabbi asked for the opportunity to speak. He told the audience that 47 years earlier, when he had visited my father’s shiva, he was struck by the enormous courage my mother had shown as a young widow. Even while sitting shiva, Rochel Steinmetz let everyone know she was going to raise her children by herself, and raise them well. And 47 years later, her children can confirm that she kept her promise.

Despite all the difficulty in her life, my mother was an absolute optimist. This Holocaust survivor, widow, and single mother insisted that the glass was always half full; and even if it wasn’t half full, it was at least a quarter full. To my mother, the most important thing a parent could give a child is a sense of hope, so she nurtured us with a steady stream of inspirational quotes and stories.

But my mother also nurtured us with silence. As a 16-year-old, she had experienced unspeakable horrors, yet she made it a point of not talking about them. Survivors have debated among themselves about whether or not they should speak about the Holocaust with their families; in my own family, my mother refused to speak much, while her sister carefully documented the events of the Shoah. Those who did speak have left a treasured historical record, and I am so grateful that my aunt left us her testimony. But I am also grateful for my mother’s silence. Even though she had a full portfolio of personal challenges, she was determined to shelter us from her struggles. She never complained, because she didn’t want to worry us; for the same reason, she never spoke with us about the Holocaust. She raised us to love life.

Mom’s silence was a symphony of determination and love, a desire to make sure the horrors of her youth were not visited on her children. As I sit silently tapping away on my keyboard, her quiet legacy still speaks loudly. I will remember many things about my mother; and I will never forget the sounds of silence, her silent struggle to provide us with a home filled with love.

***

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